Quotes by Women Physicians

Alice Hamilton
Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi
Anandi Gopal Joshi
Anna Howard Shaw
Helen Caldicott
Mary Calderone
Joycelyn Elders

Terrorists do not actually need nuclear weapons. They have been conveniently supplied with 103 nuclear power plants scattered throughout the United States (438 of these deadly facilities exist throughout the world). A planned meltdown at one of these facilities would make the World Trade Center attacks seem like child's play. The massive concrete containers protecting the reactors are not strong enough to withstand the impact of a jumbo jet.

Helen Caldicott
Helen Caldicott
Men, accustomed to think of men as possessing sex attributes and other things besides, are accustomed to think of women as having sex, and nothing else.

Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi
Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi
We have yet to beat our drums for birth control in the way we beat them for polio vaccine. We are still unable to put babies in the class of dangerous epidemics, even though this is the exact truth.

Mary Calderone
Mary Calderone
Selfish prudence is too often allowed to come between duty and human life.

These great improvements of modern times are blessings or curses on us, just in the same ratio as the mental, moral, and religious rule over the animal; or the animal propensities of our nature predominate over the intellectual and moral. The spider elaborates poison from the same flower, in which the bee finds materials out of which she manufactures honey.

But we are learning from the teaching and example of Jesus that life itself is a religion, that nothing is more sacred than a human being, that the end of all right institutions, whether the home or the church or an educational establishment, or a government, is the development of the human soul.

Anna Howard Shaw
Anna Howard Shaw
Sick people need immediate help, understanding and humanity almost as much as they need highly standardized and efficient practice.

Women have always been the guardians of wisdom and humanity, which makes them natural, but usually secret, rulers.

No man or woman should depend upon another for maintenance and necessaries. Family discord and social degradation will never end till each depends upon herself.

Anandi Gopal Joshi
Anandi Gopal Joshi
In regard to masturbation, I think that it is something that is a part of human sexuality and it's a part of something that perhaps should be taught. But we've not even taught our children the very basics. And I feel we have tried ignorance for a very long time and it's time we try education.

Joycelyn Elders
Joycelyn Elders
Every man must take time daily for quiet and meditation. In daily meditation lies the secret of power.

H. Emilie Cady
H. Emilie Cady
Why, there is Mrs. Natty B. Slymm, who is beautifully thin, and she eats twice as much as you do, and does not gain an ounce. You know positively that eating has nothing to do with it, for one time you dieted, didn't eat a thing but what the doctor ordered, besides your regular meals, and you actually gained.

Keep in mind that whenever you are in a crisis, you are in the midst of danger as well as opportunity.

It was impossible for me to believe that conditions in Europe could be worse than they were in the Polish section of Chicago, and in many Italian and Irish tenements, or that any workshops could be worse than some of those I had seen in our foreign quarters.

Alice Hamilton
Alice Hamilton
All individuals are imperfect and forgetful and find it difficult to transcend immediate self-interest. Historically therefore it has been deemed essential to create constitutional bodies that uphold and insist on adherence to certain ethical standards... If all these medical ethical bodies are to gain the respect of the public they should remain alert to intervene whenever these standards are threatened.

A lot of the appeal of internal medicine is Sherlockian—solving the case from the clues. We are detectives; we revel in the process of figuring it all out. It's what doctors most love to do.

Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.